Adam – can it beat the iPad?

We have seen a deluge of iPhone beaters but never quite gotten close. Apple moved beyond iPhone and now we are after what can beat an iPad. Would we ever find an iPad beater? Or should I ask – Would we ever find a iPad beater before Apple moves on to a next game changer?

We might have an answer for iPad and that too from the unlikely corners. A Hyderabad based company called Notion Inc has demonstrated it’s prototype which looks like a device which can compete with iPad.  It is humbly named as Adam. There are other tablets which will be launched in the next few months. Dell’s Streak, HP’s Slate and Microsoft’s Courier (which is now scrapped by Microsoft). If you look at the specs of Adam it would beat the competition and iPad by 3 miles. Here’s the list :

1. 1.7 pound in weight.
2. 3.2 megapixel swivel camera, 1080p video output
3. Pixel Qi screen (works equally well in sunlight) and Multi-touch
4. Wi-Fi
5. Bluetooth
6. 3G
7. 16 hours Battery life
8. NVidia Tegra processor (Full specification) 

The most impressive thing about Adam is its 3.2 megapixel swivel camera, 16 hour battery life (much better than iPad) and a back touch pad for browsing (never heard of this before). It also has the things which iPad should have had – 3 USB ports, 1 HDMI port, SD card slot. It betters iPad with its 10 inch screen (iPad has a 9.7 inch screen). Most importantly the screen works well in sunlight. Now ain’t that impressive? It sure is. But…

We might have a problem in dubbing Adam as an iPad beater. The  history isn’t helping. There are at least two products launched in India which generated a lot of hype but never lived up to it. One is the $10 laptop. It turned out to be a electronic brick. Other is the Infibeam’s Pi, an Amazon Kindle competitor. Pi is not a failure but it never sustained the hype. It did not have the impressive book publisher collaboration to succeed. Kindle with all of those books available on its network is in troubled waters after Apple’s entry.

What would happen to Adam then? Adam has all the ingredients. It has the hardware and provided all the things needed in a tablet. It filled many gaps left by Apple. It even supports flash. Software? No problems there too. It has chosen the Android operating system to compete with Apple’s ever growing app store. It can run Ubuntu and Chromium too. Unlike iPad it’s not locked to an Apple’s operating system, which sucks by the way( Apple is trying to include Microsoft’s Bing as as search engine replacing Google).

What’s missing for Adam? Brand. Notion Inc might have to tie up with a bigger brand to market Adam. The product is targeted for US sales as it has a US edition(which offers Bluetooth). How Notion markets Adam is something we have to wait and see. Until then I am keeping my fingers crossed.

Watch this demo of Adam. 

 

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